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Liv Hadden

The Adventures of Juice Box and Shame is written Austin author Liv Hadden has teamed up with Mo Malone, a St. Louis tattoo artist who has inked most of Liv’s own body work, for a thriller novella with comic book illustrations.

In Liv’s words:

If you read my first book, In the Mind of Revenge, then you’re aware of the stark difference between its main character, Shame, and it’s adorable comic relief, Juice Box. If you haven’t read it, here’s the short of it:

Shame = dark, broody, cynical

Juice Box = optimistic, light-hearted, naïve

This seemingly unlikely duo presented me with an interesting challenge when I decided to write The Adventures of Juice Box and Shame, the second installment in The Shamed series. I knew it wasn’t a story Shame could rightly tell for a couple reasons: one, Shame was passed out in a coma for a good portion of the time, and two, Shame would never see the events that occurred as a true adventure. I knew taking Shame’s sarcastic comment from the first book, “I took a deep breath, and prepared for the adventures of Juice Box and Shame, day two,” and turning it into something Juice Box took seriously would be a nice contrast in the narration of the same story.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how intriguing it would be for me to write about a gender non-conforming character with a protagonist that uses pronouns! Shame’s androgyny in book one was easier to deal with writing in the first person, for obvious reasons.Always referring to Shame in the third person meant getting creative while avoiding the use of pronouns in a way readers would accept.